evitatve

Evitatve is a proposed grammatical mood discussed in linguistic theory and among conlang designers to encode avoidance or prevention of an action. It is not part of established grammars or widely attested in natural languages; rather, it appears in typological speculation as a way to model a speaker’s attitude toward an action they intend to avoid.

Etymology and form: The name draws on the idea of avoidance from Latin evitare, meaning to avoid, combined with a suffix-like element modeled on the names of other moods such as optative or subjunctive. In hypothetical systems, the evitatve marker would attach to a verb stem and could interact with tense or aspect markers to signal avoidance rather than simply non-occurrence.

Meaning and use: The evitatve mood would signal that the action described by the verb is being avoided, consciously or socially discouraged, rather than merely not performed. It is conceptually distinct from prohibitive mood (which forbids an action) and from desiderative or volitive moods (which express desire or will) because it encodes avoidance as a stance or attitude independent of the action’s outcome. Some discussions treat evitatve as a tool for modeling stance, obligation, or social norms that discourage a given action.

Example: In a constructed language that includes an evitatve form, a sentence might be glossed as “I avoid going to the market,” with the verb carrying the evitatve marker rather than merely indicating tense. While no natural-language examples are attested, the concept demonstrates how moods can encode nuanced attitudes toward actions.

See also: mood, prohibitive, optative, desiderative, evidential, semantics of avoidance.